Sunday, October 16, 2005

Cringely, one of my favorite tech writers for over a decade, is as addicted to Apple watching as any geek. One of his recent columns had the slightly whacky claim that Apple was going to sell a wearable headmount display for the video iPod by the end of this year (he was reaching there -- I think this is weird enough that it will have to be pioneered by kids first).

More to my interests, he's been speculating about an Apple Airport Express replacement ...

... When the Apple experiment is complete and successful, we'll see the movie studios sign on, at which point Apple will finally announce that Video Express, which is the component still required to practically link this new video system to your TV. That rash of products will also include Apple's much faster 802.11n version of its Airport access point, which suggests that the Video Express will be 802.11n as well, which figures.

And of course that's when Apple will start selling Sony flat panel TVs in its stores. I don't think Apple will do its own brand of TVs like Gateway, Dell, and HP have done. They'll stick with Sony, which makes sense for a ton of reasons including undermining any thought Sony might have to competing with Apple in the video distribution business.

The current high-speed standard is 802.11g. It does not have the capacity to stream even lo-res digital video -- even if it were compressed. (The current Airport Express requires an uncompressed digital audio stream)! So it makes sense that a video compatible replacement would be 802.11n.